[RULE] Sell RULE computers on ebay?

[Marco Fioretti]

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003 17:20:40 at 05:20:40PM -0800, Eugene Wong  disposable_eugene at hotmail.com  wrote:
> >From: "Josh Miller" <joshdmiller at earthlink.net>
> >
> >What about digging up old computers, installing RULE, and donating them or
> >selling at a nominal price to the target audience, people who can't afford
> >computers in the first place.
> <snip>
> 
> Why give it away for free? Why not sell it to someone who is waiting in 
> line to pay for it? If they can't afford it, because they haven't got a 
> job, then they should have enough free time to go join mailing lists & read 
> the same poor manuals that we do.
>
...unless it was their school or family that could not afford
their *first* computer, in which case they would have nothing to go
join mailing lists with...
One of our original issues with Red Hat was that it sounds profoundly
idiot to have to buy more RAM for your old computer because otherwise
you cannot **install** an OS which *could* be trimmed down to work in
the original amount of RAM...
 
> I'm just trying to find a way for open source advocates to make money. Why 
> must everything be free?
> 

Nobody, starting from Stallman himself, would disagree with your
question.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Free Software advocates making
money out of it (note the distinction: Open Source SW, which is a Good
Thing anyway, happened later to make money with software normally
licensed with restrictions, but coming with source code).

Said this, the RULE project "mission statement", if you forgive this
slip into corporate speak, is to be a fun hack,
to do it "just because", and, more seriously, to provide the tools (a
trimmed set of modern Free SW, currently based on Red Hat) that make
it easier to make older computers useful again. If project members or
anybody else start to actually distribute RULE PCs for profit or
charity, it's great, and we can exchange links, but is not the
direct/original purpose.

Last but not least, before this can happen we need to polish it and
add more packages, don't we?

	Ciao,
	 	Marco Fioretti



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